Through the window, out the door

An important moment in many novels and poems by American women writers occurs when a central character looks out a window or walks out the door of a house. These acts of departure serve to convey such values as the rejection of constraining social patterns, the search for individual fulfillment, and the entry into the political. Janis Stout examines such moments and related patterns of venture and travel in the fiction of five major American novelists of the 20th century: Mary Austin, Willa Cather, Anne Tyler, Toni Morrison, and Joan Didion. Moving between texts and between texts and contexts, Stout shows how women writers have envisioned the walls of both physical and social structures (including genres) as permeable boundaries, drawing on both a rhetoric of liberation and a rhetoric of domesticity to construct narrative arguments for women's right to move freely between the two.